Gordon Comstock is a very good advertising copywriter and a pretty bad
poet. But if he indulges his delusion that he can write poetry, he
gets to live a bohemian life of chic poverty, easy morality, and reflexive
socialism. Admitting he's really meant to write advertising jingles
would require him to settle into a respectable, but dreaded, middle class
existence of comfort, family, and an aspidistra
in the window. The horror, the horror....

You can judge who the three most important writers of the last three
centuries were by the attempts of both Left and Right to co-opt them and
claim them as their own : Adam Smith (18th Century); Alexis
de Tocqueville (19th Century); and George
Orwell (20th Century). With the exception of people telling me
I'm swinish for not thinking that James
Joyce, Samuel Beckett,
and the James brothers (Henry
and William)
are geniuses, I'd guess that no topic has generated more hostile email
to Brothers Judd than our classifying Orwell as a conservative. These
hostile correspondents though never offer any more evidence than the mere
fact that Orwell called himself a socialist and fought
against Franco in the
Spanish Civil War. It goes almost without saying that they don't
refer to his writings, because it is there that their argument falls apart.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the semi-autobiographical--indeed,
Orwell later thought it overly autobiographical--Keep the Aspidistra
Flying.

The title of the book is awkward and maybe even off-putting, but necessary.
Meanwhile, the filmmakers chose an equally appropriate, but misleading
title, for Gordon Comstock is at war on two fronts. The first is
with his long-suffering girlfriend, Rosemary, who he hopes to coerce into
bed without marrying :

Each laughed with delight at the other's absurdities.
There was a merry war between them.

The second front is Gordon's war against the money god :

What he realised, and more clearly as time went on,
was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps
it is the only
real religion--the only really felt religion--that
is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil
have no meaning any longer
except failure and success. Hence the profoundly
significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced
to two
commandments. One for the employers--the elect,
the money-priesthood as it were--'Thou shalt make money'; the other for
the
employed--the slaves and underlings--'Thou shalt
not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The
Ragged TrouseredPhilanthropists and read about the starving
carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The
aspidistra, flower of England!
It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the
lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while
there are aspidistras
in windows.

By God! That sounds like a ringing enough call to arms doesn't
it? Except, that is, for the inconvenient title of the novel : Keep
the AspidistraFlying. This story, like nearly all of
Orwell's, is anti-revolutionary and possessed of both a deep love of middle-class
England and a good-natured contempt for wealthy socialists (like Comstock's
publisher, Ravelston) and all of those (like Gordon himself) who romanticize
poverty and the poor. And so, when Gordon, who by then has been reduced
to rather dire straits, finally abandons his life of destitution and the
half-written book of inane poems that he'd been writing to resume his advertising
job and marry Rosemary, who he's gotten in the family way, it is in no
wise a defeat, but a triumph :

Now that the thing was done he felt nothing but relief;
relief that now at last he had finished with dirt, cold, hunger and loneliness
and could get back to decent, fully human life. His resolutions,
now that he had broken them, seemed nothing but a frightful weight that
he had cast off. Moreover, he was aware that he was only fulfilling
his destiny. In some corner of his mind he had always known that
this would happen. He thought of the day when he had given them notice
at New Albion; and Mr. Erskine's kind, red, beefish face, gently counselling
him not to chuck up a 'good' job for nothing. How bitterly he had
sworn, then, that he was done with 'good' jobs for ever! Yet it was
foredoomed that he should come back, and he had known it even then.
And it was not merely because of Rosemary and the baby that he had done
it. That was the obvious cause, the precipitating cause, but even
without it the end would have been the same ; if there had been no baby
to think about, something else would have forced his hand. For it
was what, in his secret heart, he had desired.

And if that doesn't convince you that the story represents a whole-hearted
embrace of bourgeois existence, try this :

Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but
in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted
into
something nobler. The lower-middle-class people
in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps
of furniture
and their aspidistras--they lived by the money-code,
sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code
as they
interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish.
They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They
'kept themselves
respectable'--kept the aspidistra flying.
Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle
of life. They begot children,
which is what the saints and the soul-savers never
by any chance do.

The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.

Orwell offers up this wisdom with a light touch. He also has the
characteristically brutal honesty to portray Comstock (his younger self)
as quite a horse's arse during his bohemian phase. This comes through
even more clearly in the film, where Comstock (as played by Richard E.
Grant) is nearly difficult to like, prior to his epiphany. It is
only when he accepts his own responsibility for the life growing in Rosemary
that he comes to be "fully human" and likable.

Now, if you can reconcile all of that with a belief that Orwell should
be considered a man of the Left and not essentially a conservative, kindly
drop us a line and explain. Meanwhile, we'll keep the aspidistra
flying.

FILM GRADE : A-

Buy the book
and the film, A Merry War [aka Keep the Aspidistra Flying] (1997) (directed by Robert Beirman) at Amazon.com